We have seen that Chasles, the French reactionary quoted by
Mr. Milyukov, correctly considers that the agrarian question is the “crux
of the matter” confronting
Russia.[1]

Mr. Milyukov quoted a clever statement by a clever reactionary but he
does not understand it at all!

“Can the peasant whom you [i.e., the Octobrists and the government,
for it is to them that Mr. Milyukov talks!] have brought into this
body with your own hands be made dependent? After all, he speaks of the
land from this rostrum, and he says the same thing as the independent
peasant said in the First and Second Dumas. There is no element in Russian
life, gentlemen, more independent or more stable than the Russian
peasant.” (Applause on the right and voices: “Hear, hear”.)

Those handclaps must have come from the hypocritical Cadets alone, for
everyone knows, firstly, that in the Third and Fourth Dumas the peasants
have been saying not quite “the same thing” but something weaker
than they said in the First and Second Dumas; and secondly, there
is in Russian life an element that is more independent and more
stable. Mr. Milyukov himself was compelled to admit in his speech
that it is the workers who have done “most” for political
liberty in Russia. Or can “independence” be measured with a different
yardstick?

But this is not the point. The point is, can the interests of 130,000
landlords and of the mass of the peasantry be reconciled now?
Mr. Milyukov “talked round and round” this question to evade an
answer.

But Mr. S. Litovtsev, hired by Rech to praise P. Milyukov,
wrote that Milyukov’s speech had

“dispelled the fog shrouding this sharp and debatable
question. To many people, universal suffrage is still a sort of bogey, the
height of revolutionism”.

Learn from the reactionary Chasles, liberal wind-bags! The crux of the
matter lies in the agrarian question. Can the interests of 130,000 landlord
families and 40,000,000 peasant families be reconciled on this question
now? Yes or no?

That is the “crux” of the matter as far as universal
suffrage is concerned, Mr. Milyukov, while you corrupt the
political consciousness of the people by muddling up with phrases
this main point, which is obvious to any intelligent person.

If your answer to the question is yes, I shall refute you by
means of your own admission that the peasants in the Third and
Fourth Dumas have been saying (if less emphatically) the “same
thing” as they said in the First and Second Dumas.

If, however, your answer is no, then all your talk
about the conciliatory, non-“one-sided” character of universal
suffrage in the Russia of today falls to the ground.

And your learned references to Bismarck are sheer childishness, for
Bismarck “granted” universal suffrage at a time when the bourgeois
development of Germany had already reconciled the interests of the
landlords and all the well-to-do peasants, and even a section of the middle
peasants.

The shrewd reader may ask: does it not follow that universal suffrage
is impossible in Russia? No, we will answer the shrewd reader, it only
follows that a reformist point of view is impossible in Russia.